For many calculus students, Riemann sums are those annoying things that show up in the derivation of the arc length formula.

In truth, these handy sums have done so much more. In this post, I’ll give some examples of Riemann sums dating from before the birth of calculus and some applications of Riemann sums that are still used today.

One of the ingredients in a paper that Bram Petri and I submitted in 2016 was a count of integer matrices of determinant 1 with non-negative entries and bounded trace.

Our paper only required an upper bound, but as a number theorist I couldn’t resist the temptation of describing the asymptotics of this function more precisely. In this post we explore do just that, exploring Dirchlet’s hyperbola method along the way.

Just how good are polynomials at producing primes? Do there exist polynomials that produce primes for arbitrarily many consecutive inputs?

In this post, I’ll give a brief overview of what we expect to be able to prove, and show how interpolating polynomials can produce record-breaking prime-generators. (And then break a record, because why not?)